Israel will need to use at least 100 planes and fly more than 1,000
miles above unfriendly airspace should it decide to attack Iran, the
New York Times reported on Monday, citing the assessment of U.S.
defense officials close to the Pentagon.

According to the report, American military analysts and defense
officials believe that an Israeli strike on Iran´s nuclear facilities
would be a highly complex operation, and say that it would be very
different from Israel´s "surgical" strike on Iraq´s Osirak reactor in
1981 and would also differ from the strike that Israel is believed to
have carried out in Syria in 2007.

"All the pundits who talk about ‘Oh, yeah, bomb Iran,’ it ain’t going
to be that easy,” the report quoted Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, who
retired last year as the Air Force’s top intelligence official.

Andrew R. Hoehn, a former Pentagon official, was also quoted as
saying, "I don’t think you’ll find anyone who’ll say, ‘Here’s how
it’s going to be done — handful of planes, over an evening, in and
out.´"

Meanwhile, the report also cited comments by former CIA director
Michael Hayden, who said that Israel is not capable of carrying out
airstrikes that would seriously set back Iran´s nuclear program,
partly due to the distance the aircraft would have to travel.

According to the report, U.S. military analysts believe that Israel
will have a serious problem reaching Iran´s four major nuclear sites –
the urnainum enrichment facilities at Natanz and Fordo, the heavy
water reactor near Arak, and the uranium conversion plant near
Isfahan.

Israel has three possible routes to those facilities – north over
Turkey, south over Saudi Arabia, or a central route across Jordan and
Iraq.

U.S. defense analysts believe that the route over Iraq would be
preferable, since Iraq effectively has no air defenses and the U.S.
is no longer defending Iraq´s airspace. According to officials,
should Jordan allow Israel to fly over its territory, the next issue
for Israel is that the range of its fighter jets falls short of the
2,000-mile round trip.

For this reason, officials say, Israel would need to use airborne
refueling planes, called tankers, and then those tankers would need
to be protected by more fighter planes, which significantly increases
the number of planes needed for the operation.